


Human Paintings

by faenova



Category: AR∀GO ロンドン市警特殊犯罪捜査官 | Arago
Genre: Auras, Gen, Illustrated, Introspection, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-15
Updated: 2018-08-08
Packaged: 2019-05-07 05:53:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 1,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14664645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/faenova/pseuds/faenova
Summary: Arago's gotten pretty good at reading auras.





	1. Joe

Joe's aura feels like home. Dark calming greens and sensible browns, mixed with deep wise blues and determined magenta. He has no defining lines where the colors stop, they seem to swirl endlessly and bleed into each other in lazy patterns like a watercolor painting. If you were into art, you might want to paint what you see, but that sounds like a lot of effort.

 

 

Now, you wish you had drawn it. You wish you had done... something. Pictures don't do Joe's aura justice. Not the ones you've seen. Not the one at his memorial, certainly.

It's hard to look at pictures of him and it's harder to remember the exact shades he was.

You wish you had appreciated it more.

You wish he hadn't

 

You wish

 

 

 

 

Dammit

 

 

 


	2. Seth

Seth looks human, until you squint. He fooled you once and he'll probably continue to fool everyone, but you think you can see something Other that shouldn't be in a human's aura. Seth's emotions are always in check on the surface, and he effortlessly makes sure his colors reflect that. Creative indigo and intelligent blues, fading into deep haughty violet down his legs. His hands are peppered in a take-action neon orange, and arrogant red streaks through his torso and face. There are old wounds on his aura, older than is reasonable for someone his age. Faint afterimages of what used to be fractures and holes around his head and his abdomen. Some patched up hastily, others carefully sewn back together with other colors. All of them healed nicely, or at least appearing to have healed nicely. You hope it's real and not another illusion Seth presents the world.

But underneath is a bright neon blue, the same color as his wings, humming just beneath his skin. If you squint, that's what you see. The impression of wings on his back, the facial markings, and the point at his chest where the false seed sits underneath his ribcage that spreads the color throughout his body like delicate spiderwebs underneath his personality. It's a pretty pattern. You've done your best to commit it to memory, in case you never see it again. But you will.

Lia Fáil can't hold him forever.


	3. Oz

Oz doesn't look human. Oz doesn't look like anything. He has no aura, which is weird even for magical creatures who know how to mask themselves. No one ever erases their presence completely like Oz does.

You ask him, once, if Oz can show you what his aura looks like. He laughs and says you need to buy him dinner first. Then you ask, again only once, if Albion taught him this way so he could sneak up on creatures that rely on auric senses. He says no, that they taught control but not erasure. He says he feels more comfortable like this, when no one can see him. You wonder if he's always done this, or if he only started after his family died. You don't ask it out loud, though.

The first time you see Oz's aura is after gogmagog, and you wish it were under better circumstances.

You try to heal him as best you can, to stop him from bleeding out, but there's only so much you can do against infection and shrapnel (that is to say, you can do nothing except make it worse). He needs real surgery, and you're left quietly worrying in the waiting room until you're allowed to see him. You're not allowed to help, the doctors say. Brionac is too much of an unknown factor and they would rather let Oz heal slow than heal wrong. You think about your own bent out of shape insides, and agree.

He's unconscious when you're finally allowed in his room. It's hard to look at his personality through the painful red lines that turn into solid swaths of color around his arm and leg. Underneath, his personality is muted. It feels like the colors should be more vibrant, more... just more. He's mostly a golden yellow, and you're more surprised than you probably should be. It makes sense that Oz is a people person. He's always been good with others, seems to enjoy when he's in a crowded space. He's smattered in so many greens you're not sure where one shade ends and another begins. The pale leaf colored chill attitude, the bright lime tolerance and acceptance. You recognize the deep forest green, he's projected that calm on you enough times to be familiar with it.

There's less red in his personality layer than you expect, which really _does_ surprise you. It's like he's only recently developed the leadership qualities and take-charge attitude that he so easily displays. It curls around his neck and barely reaches his chest, where... the fractures start.

They aren't recent. They haven't even begun to heal. Newer fractures lead out to his severed limbs, where the outline of his arm and leg still exist, flickering and flaring angry colors even in a drugged sleep.

Everything on Oz flickers and shifts. You aren't sure what's happening until he groans. He must be trying to put his aura on lockdown again now that he's waking up, but all he seems to be managing is muting a few colors. You tear your gaze away from the fractures and to his face, and try to tell him that it'll be okay.


	4. Rio

You see Rio's aura in double. It seems like there's far more colors than there should be, ever since she started wearing the wolf pelt. The dark red dominates like a shield of aggression and power, and orange smears across her eyes and goes all the way up her arms like a mask and gloves made up of sheer force of will. But that's just her second skin. Her original personality is more obscured now, but you remember what it looks like well enough. Rio is an ocean; a beautiful blue and green ocean that's clever, patient, and slow to anger and impossible to calm when the violet peeks through. Bright gold covers her mouth, her ears, her heart, with empathy and friendliness.

She has a fracture. A big one, over her heart. You remember seeing it cracking wide open at Ewan's grave, growing wider as she cried, threatening to consume her whole. But now, every day it grows a little smaller. You think it won't be too long at all until it's healed completely. But you can still see the scars that it left behind when it was bigger, stretching up her neck, across her shoulders, down to her stomach. You know she's not the kind of person to let it hinder her, but you wonder if she'll ever truly move on from Ewan.


	5. Coco

Coco's aura is as bright as ever, made up entirely of blinding pastel colors even after she gets over her crush. She's just... always like that, apparently. Pink determination like Joe's practically bursts from her chest, specks of it reaching all the way through her gentle baby blue and accepting lime green that spirals like candy cane stripes over her whole body. Underneath is a pale yellow, so many of your friends are yellows and golds and you don't know what you did to deserve such good kind people. The gold fades into a softer peach in some places, quiet, caring, loving.

You've never seen her aura break. No holes, fractures, or even so much as a tiny crack in her personality. Even after Joe... her colors melted together into ugly muddy things, blurred lines and incomprehensible meanings that were impossible to sway. But she went back to normal eventually. The colors were heavier for a while, deeper and darker than her usual self, but even that didn't stay for long before she went back to pastels. You think that she's a lot stronger than people give her credit for.


	6. Ewan

You only ever saw Ewan's aura when he was under Patchman's control.

You try to forget what it looked like.


	7. Arago

You don't know what your aura looks like. Brionac is too bright, too strong for you to even begin to see the colors underneath the blinding rainbow when you look at yourself in the mirror.

Actually, more often than not you walk by the bathroom mirror and scare the shit out of yourself before you realize it's just your aura and not an intruder. It's not even funny. No matter how much Oz laughs at you.

But not even Oz can see past the rainbows to your real colors. Rio didn't have Sight before you got brionac so she can't tell you either.

You only have the one picture of your family from before you got brionac, but you were a child. You're sure your aura would look different now.

In fact, you don't really have any pictures of yourself _now_ either. They come out bright and blurry now, even in the dark.

You think maybe, underneath the rainbow, you're just one big fracture. At least, that's what it feels like.

Maybe it's better if you can't over analyze yourself. You're not that good at it anyway.


End file.
